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Do backlinks which contain parameters pass value

For some of our partners, we use our own tracking string in the url i.e. www.mysite.com/landingpage.html?partner=123456 . This has caused backlinks to be created to our site containing the partner string. I was wondering if these links would pass value to www.mysite.com/landingpage.html and the tracking parameters would be ignored or would Google treat www.mysite.com/landingpage.html?partner=123456 as its own page. If it did treat it as a seperate page, could you reclaim some of it using the canoncial tag?

2 Responses

In addition to Lynns point it would be worth discounting these URL parameters in Google webmaster tools and bing in order to avoid any possible duplicate content issues, rather than leaving it to them to work out which will also avoid the case Lynn mentions for organic search (A case we also expoerienced with a client!)

This is a good example of when to use the canonical tag. Set it up for the main landing page without any url variables and you should be good to go. Google will know which version of the page to concentrate value on and also which version of the page to index and show in the search results. It is crucial actually, I saw a case once where the url with a partner id in it got indexed and was being shown in the search results.... you can imagine what effect that had on proper tracking when half the organic visits were clicking on a url with a partner id in it!!

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